Man’s best friend central in Johnston’s new show
Over the years, readers of this column may have encountered a dog called Larry. His name is neither his fault nor mine; it was inherited from the SPCA where we adopted him as a puppy 10 years ago.
Larry is 50% Labrador and 50% who-knows-what. He was a fine athlete in his prime, but old age and arthritis are getting the better of him. Still, he’s a beautiful canine being, from his noble snout to his ever-wagging tail. Like all dogs, he has a pure soul: infinitely trusting, infinitely loyal, infinitely hopeful that it’s time for supper or a tummyscratch or a visit to the park.
He’s clever enough — sit, stay, that sort of thing — but as his younger human siblings learned to walk, talk and read, his limited cognitive abilities have been exposed.
Emotional intelligence is more his thing. He has empathy in abundance. He shows sincere contrition for his transgressions (almost always involving stolen food). He can read the mood in a room better than most people, although he’s never been very good at playing it cool.
Of all animals, dogs are most likely to lure us into anthropomorphism — the act of attributing human characteristics to nonhuman things. Apes may be much closer to us genetically, but for many people dogs are the creatures who most poignantly blur the human-animal divide.
It is precisely their proximity to us that gives them such contentious symbolic capital. A dog may be “man’s best friend”, but “dog” is also an insult, and “being treated like a dog” means abjection. In SA, this slippage is inflected by race: consider the connotations of police dogs, racist white animal lovers and clever blacks who have dogs as pets.
Dogs are the central figures in Mandy Johnston’s new show, Reasons for Silence (at Lizamore & Associates in Parkwood, Johannesburg, until June 22). Johnston is wrestling with a world of excess and “noise” in which the greedy “consumption of images and information” might be seen as “an avoidance tactic” — a distraction from our mortality. In such a world, objects are easily commodified, and yet the objects remain silent, enviably free of the impulse to consume.
The artist invokes Franz Kafka’s invention of the Odradek: a combination of creature and object, a mysterious nonentity, a fragmented thing that has no apparent meaning or use but that stubbornly persists in existing. Critics have read the Odradek as depicting everything from the alienating experience of capitalism to the strange processes of memory and repression. In Johnson’s rendering, it becomes tumbleweed: discarded, neglected, but powerfully silent.
Dogs seem to present a comparable paradox.
Johnston is struck by stray dogs in particular, which to her “become a poignant symbol of consumer excess and that which is passed down through generations”.
But dogs are not only to be pitied; they are also to be admired, for they are not beset by the noise of language, image and acquisition. As they are vulnerable, they may become violent. Their survivalist instincts, albeit somewhat dulled by suburbia, give them a clear sense of purpose.
The ambiguities of Johnston’s dogs are complemented by Lwandiso Njara’s Engineering the New Jerusalem II (also at Lizamore & Associates), which fuses the animal and the mechanical.
Njara seems to be more optimistic than Johnston about 21st century modernity; the series of drawings from which his exhibition takes its name may be ironically titled, but one senses that it is earnest. His professed “hybrid sense of identity” — African and European influences; the isiXhosa language and Catholic theology — finds affirmation in the hybrid subjects of his work.
A Gautrain carriage pulling alongside a station platform merges with a buffalo or kudu. The sturdy weight of a rhino contains the pipes and pistons of an engine.
Put into words, Njara’s concept seems like the forced contraction of false binaries. The execution of his drawings and sculptures, however, is exquisite and persuasive.